I woke up Saturday morning to find our bathroom floor covered in urine. Someone had broken rule No. 2 on the SnowBunnys placard: “Aim!!!” Other edicts included: “Don’t flush accident underwear” and “If you find snot or shit on your finger don’t wipe it on anything except toilet paper.”
No matter. It was Hahnenkamm downhill day, and I’d just gotten six hours of sleep, my best night yet. Josh had departed, but Jake and I had welcomed four new roommates, including Will, 21, and Rupert, 16, brothers from England who had come to celebrate their dad’s 50th birthday. They’d stumbled in after midnight and proceeded to cough and loudly scratch themselves until they passed out.
A Europop version of John Denver’s “Country Roads” blared outside our window as six fans with Austrian flags painted on their cheeks pounded beers in a circle, chanting. It was 8:15 A.M., more than three hours before the World Cup start. On my way to the race, I saw two ticket scalpers and asked if I could take their photo. One ducked away. “Oh, is it illegal?” I asked. “No,” said the other. “He didn’t shave today.”
At the venue, the vibe felt similar to that of the X Games: young adults hopped up on energy drinks and booze, techno blaring, flags waving. Tickets had long ago sold out—a galaxy apart from the World Cup races I was used to, like the Birds of Prey at posh Beaver Creek Resort in Colorado, where attendance is free and fans are counted in the hundreds.
The stands were a place to be seen, like a heavyweight fight in Vegas. Attendees included ardent Hahnenkamm fan Arnold Schwarzenegger (“He’s baaaaaahhhhk,” blared the announcer when the big screen cut to Arnie’s white-bearded mug) and Swedish soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who was interviewed from the stands.
Zlatan: “This is amazing. I wish I could ski.”
Reporter: “You can’t ski?”
“No, that is the problem.”
“You need to get a good instructor.”
“I got, but I fired him. He didn’t do his job.”
Young men urinated on the side of the piste without attracting a second glance.
Finally, the action began. The announcer referred to Austrian racers by first name: “Yes, Stefan!” Crowd: “Babinsky!”
Swiss superstar Marco Odermatt, the three-time reigning World Cup overall champion and winner of the previous day’s super-G, made uncharacteristic mistakes and the mob groaned: Another year without the elusive Hahnenkamm crown for Odi.
Starting 20th, Canadian James Crawford aced the notorious Steilhang turn and emerged with a green split time, leading by .23 seconds. This was shocking for a few reasons: 1) Crawford had never won a World Cup race, 2) only once in nine Hahnenkamm downhills had he finished better than 23rd, and 3) his father Angus was my hostel-mate Jake’s best friend from Toronto.
Built like a bullet at 5-foot-8 and 180 pounds, Crawford, who goes by “Jack,” maintained his tuck down the rest of the Streif, arcing and soaring and barely holding on, until he crossed the finish to raucous cheers and another green number. Subsequent racers tried but failed to top him, and Crawford won by eight one-hundredths of a second, the first Canadian victory here in 42 years. Another Canuck, Cameron Alexander, placed third, sandwiching Swiss runner-up Alexis Monney.
Disappointed by their home country’s failure, some Austrian fans streamed out while the back of the pack continued to race. I found Jake and Angus later, clutching cans of beer next to the media corral, grins plastered from earlobe to earlobe. It was a far cry from Georgian Peaks, the private ski club in southern Ontario (vertical drop: 820 feet) where Jack learned to ski.
Angus told me he can’t stand still when Jack races, so he walked around during his run. People shouted at him to get out of their view. When Jack crossed in first, “We were jumping up and down, crawling on the snow,” Angus said. “Just the two of us. Then we had a beer. Shaking. We’ve been shaking for an hour.”
They knew about the tradition of Hahnenkamm winners showing up at the Londoner pub late at night, half-clothed, raising hell behind the bar. “I may not make it to the Londoner tonight,” Angus forewarned, to which Jake scoffed: “Oh, my shirt’s already off.”
On my walk back to the press center, I saw a young man dig a beer bottle out of the snow, hoping it was full, then toss it back when it wasn’t, next to a mother nursing her baby on the ground. I asked a cop at the railroad crossing, “Everyone behaving?” He smiled and rocked his hand back and forth. “So-so.”
That night, after wading through a street party unlike anything I’d seen, I talked my way into the Londoner through a side door. The scene looked like something from the 1978 comedy Animal House.
Jake and Angus arrived at 1 A.M. with a Canadian delegation that ran 20 deep, a few minutes before Jack rode in on his teammate’s shoulders, his entrance announced by loudspeaker. Soon a dozen burly downhillers were behind the bar, pecs and biceps glistening in champagne, shaking each other like animals let out from their cages. Drunken patrons made out amid the spray.
Later the racers would don black staff T-shirts, which read: “If the downhill didn’t kill you the Londoner will”—or, simply, “The mountain life is hard.”
